The garbage topic in Russia is one of the most popular. Millions of volunteers go out to clean up, and major activist movements insist on the need to sort and recycle waste. However, there are skeptics who believe that "there is a lot of land in Russia, so landfills can be made." American skeptic John Tierney believes that it is not only about land, but about economic expediency.
Here is his column for the New York Times.
If you live in the USA, then most likely you somehow separate and dispose of garbage. For example, choose paper, plastic, glass and metal. You may be washing cans and bottles and dumping food leftovers into a compost bin. You believe that if you arrange everything in the baskets correctly, you will help your city and protect the environment. However, is it worth wasting your time on all this?
In 1996, I wrote a long article for The New York Times Magazine arguing that the current recycling system is too expensive, even wasteful. I have provided evidence for my claim, but advocates of recycling have requested that you take your time. They hoped that modern approaches to recycling started functioning several years ago and that over time they will become simpler and cheaper.
What has happened since then? Indeed, there are more people involved in the separation and recycling process.
However, little has changed at the intersection of economic efficiency and environmental benefits.
Despite years of advocacy and subsidies, waste sorting is in most cases more expensive for municipalities than it is to landfill. Secondary raw material prices fell due to falling oil prices and declining exports of recycled waste. The decline of the industry led to the refusal of some factories from further expansion or the introduction of new processing technologies. It got to the point where one of the industry veterans tried to cheer up colleagues with an article titled "The Recycle Didn't Die."
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Politicians are announcing ever more ambitious garbage targets, but the recycling system itself is stagnating. Yes, residents of the wealthy neighborhoods of Brooklyn and San Francisco support the idea of recycling, but the less affluent residents of the Bronx and Houston are not eager to sort trash in their free time.
The future of recycling looks even worse. Outside the city, the costs of recycling paper, metals, glass, food waste and plastics are skyrocketing, and the environmental benefits are reduced or disappeared.
“It costs a lot more than expected to try to turn trash into gold. We must understand for ourselves: what is the purpose here,”says David Steiner, director of waste management at the largest recycling company in the United States.
Fortunately, the processing was hammered into people from kindergarten.
As a result, even educated citizens cannot appreciate the real benefits of recycling. They probably don't know that sorting out paper and aluminum cans can actually cut carbon emissions, but plastic yogurt cups or a half-eaten pizza slice in compost won't help. Many people think recycling plastic bottles will help the planet a lot. They were inspired by the calls of conservationists: "hand over plastic and reduce CO2 emissions."
Let's compare how it works? For example, to compensate for CO2 emissions from one round-trip economy class flight from New York to London, 40,000 bottles will need to be recycled. And a flight in business class, where each passenger takes up more space, can only compensate for more than 100,000 recycled plastic bottles.
Chances are, you may not have thought that rinsing a plastic bottle before handing it in will nullify your efforts to reduce CO2 emissions. You are wasting water that took electricity to get to your home. If this energy was obtained at a coal-fired power plant, then washing the bottle becomes more harmful to the environment than just throwing it away dirty.
For many government officials, recycling is a moral issue rather than a cost benefit analysis. Mayor De Blasio in New York said that by 2030, the city will not poison garbage at all in landfills. Seattle and other cities are also moving towards zero waste.
In total, in the United States, the percentage of recycled waste has grown since the 1990s to 25%. One of the responsible officials noted that it is profitable to recycle no more than 35% of the country's waste. However, many politicians and officials ignored this warning and talked about 50% recyclable waste. These goals have not been achieved and now the recycling is "marking time" at 34%.
One of the reasons for the recycling craze was the fear that there would be no landfill sites. But the problem, inflated by the media, has never really stood out for a country with such vastness. In 1996 statistics, I found that all US trash over the next thousand years would fit 1% of grazing land. Moreover, even this small amount of land will not be lost. As a rule, landfills are overgrown with grass and parks are set up there. For example, Freshkills Park is being built on the site of a former landfill on Staten Island. The USA Open tennis tournament was held at the site of an old landfill, although during its operation it did not come close to meeting today's environmental requirements.
Despite the fact that cities do not want to see landfills next to them, villagers are not so categorical. Landfills are cheaper for them, and the mass of free space and trees around settlements eliminates the unpleasant sight and smell of waste. Due to this, a strong shortage of landfill sites is not yet felt. The second trouble is the rise in the price of raw materials, which also did not happen, which means that processing did not become profitable.
When economic benefits were in question, recycling protogonists resorted to environmental arguments. Scientists have calculated what the environmental benefits of recycling are, and it turned out that they are not what most expected.
These advantages do not apply to the landfill area. Modern, well-equipped landfills cause minimal damage to the environment. The only thing really bad there is the release of the powerful greenhouse gas methane. However, landfill operators have figured out how to extract it and use it to generate electricity. The unpopular waste incinerators are now quite environmentally friendly, and the green countries of the European Union and Japan are using them to generate energy as well.
In addition, the recycling system is not very environmentally friendly due to the need for road transport and the messy recycling process. Complaints are coming from all over the country about compost heaps, which give off an unpleasant smell and are infested with rats. Delaware began composting food waste after New York. The unhappy people living next to this enterprise carried out a campaign to close it and still managed to close it.
The environmental benefits of recycling mainly relate to the reduction in the use of new raw materials, and hence the funds for its extraction. But the extractive industries are not happy with this. After all, despite the fact that they are already loaded with "green" requirements, they will be forced to cut staff.
The US EPA estimates that more than 90 percent of the benefits from recycling come from paper, cardboard and metals such as aluminum. Recycling of one ton of metal or paper saves about three tons of CO2 emissions, one ton of plastic saves a little more than one ton of CO2, a ton of food saves less than a ton of CO2, and a ton of glass saves three times less than a ton of CO2.
Once you eliminate paper and metals, the total annual CO2 savings in the United States from recycling plastic, glass, food, yard waste, textiles, rubber, and leather are only two tenths of one percent of the US carbon footprint.
From a business perspective, refining is in conflict with two major economic trends. First, over the centuries the cost of labor has been increasing, while the cost of raw materials has been decreasing. That is why we can afford to buy more material goods than our ancestors could. At the same time, recycling is becoming an increasingly expensive way to produce the most primitive materials. The second trend is the rise in the cost of the sorting process itself, despite the fact that after recycling, cheap products are obtained.
Processors have tried to improve the economy by automating the sorting process, but that hasn't helped.
In New York, the cost of disposing a ton of garbage now costs $ 300 more than burying the same ton in a landfill. This amount is a million dollars a year, or half of the city parks budget. For this money, you can buy much more efficient ways to combat CO2 emissions.
What should a conscious, rational person do?
It would be simpler and more efficient to introduce a carbon tax, a garbage tax.
Why do so many government officials keep promising and not doing? Politicians and bureaucrats are trying to please the Greens while reaching out to many voters. Garbage worries everyone. He makes people feel good. The imposed processing becomes a religion.
Religion does not need scientific foundations; people follow rituals voluntarily.
But many processors want to make these rituals mandatory for everyone, not just their followers. Seattle became so aggressive that it received a lawsuit from its own residents. They argue that inspectors who force the sorting of rubbish violate their constitutional right to privacy.
Building a zero waste society will generate millions of overseers. When the mayor promised to remove trash in New York, he said it was "ridiculous" and "old" to bury trash at landfills. The mayor declared recycling as the only option for the city.
Meanwhile, cities have dumped their garbage in landfills for thousands of years, and this is still the easiest and cheapest way to get rid of waste. The recycling movement is stalled and depends on constant subsidies, propaganda and police for its survival. Is it possible to build a sustainable city on an unsustainable strategy?
© Natalya Paramonova
A in the article Waste sorting. For what and who needs it? laid out on the shelves and projected onto our everyday life.